Do It Yourself Scanning or Outsourcing?

At this point, there's no doubt that you've seen the benefits of going paperless. The benefits include instantaneous document retrieval, increased efficiency, searchable text, and minimized storage requirements. While these are all great things, you're probably wondering how you even go about getting started on going paperless? Should you hire someone to do it for you, or is it simple enough to do on your own? Making the decision to take the plunge on paperless can be difficult, but let us set your mind at ease about getting started.

Pertinent things for you to consider include:

The amount of documents to scan

If you just need to scan a small amount of documents without much indexing, then simply employing a desktop scanner is most likely your best option. It's cost-effective and user-friendly! However, if you have a sizeable amount of pages to scan, you may want to outsource the task due to the expense of high-capacity scanners and the sheer time and space it will take up. There's also the possibility that you need a lot scanned initially, then just small things later. This is where a hybrid option comes in, where you outsource the first chunk then DIY the rest.

The physical size of the documents to be scanned

If you're needing to scan any documents larger than legal size, you'll definitely require a large format scanner, or you need to simply send it off to be outsourced if you lack the equipment/don't wish to purchase the equipment.

The ability to stay on top of scanning

Most businesses have �busy seasons� where they may require more document scanning in order to stay on top of everything. This can become overwhelming at times, which is where outsourcing becomes your friend. It may not save you a ton of money, but it will save you significant time, energy, and man hours in the long-run.

Scanning prep-work

The scanning process is only about 20% of the time commitment involved. The rest of that time is preparing the documents to be scanned. If there is tape, staples, binding or any other foreign items that could impede scanning, it must first be removed. Just this process alone can make outsourcing worth it.

The ability to maintain quality control

All documents must be indexed properly if you're hoping to access them later down the road. This can take some finesse and attention to detail, which may be difficult for employees to maintain. It can be much simpler to outsource this in order to ensure that everything is done correctly and in an accessible way.

If you take all of these things into consideration, you should be able to confidently determine whether it's worth going down the DIY route or sending you documents over to us to assist in any steps of the process you see fit! Contact DRS today to find out what we can do for you.